1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a passive optical network (PON) for providing a large scale of data at high speed to subscribers More particularly, the present invention relates to a passive optical network that comprises an Optical Line Terminal (OLT) for providing large scale communication service of 100 Mbps or more, high speed communication service and broadcasting service to subscribers, a plurality of Optical Network Terminals (ONTs) and a passive optical branching/coupling device, and employs CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access).
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, many services such as internet service providers (ISPs), are accessed by most internet service subscribers using one of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), cable modems, dial-up modems, Metro-Ethernet, etc., at speeds of 56 kbps to several Mbps. Also, with the increase of bandwidth required by subscribers downloading larger and larger files, it has been possible to provide data service to subscribers at about 10 Mbps by using VDSL (Very High Bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line) and so forth. However, in order to provide various services—such as a large quantity of visual information service, VoD (Video on Demand) service, high quality broadcasting service and so forth—to subscribers, transmission of data at about 100 Mbps is required, and thus it is impossible to provide the various services with only some of the technologies described above. Therefore, the necessity of construction of optical subscriber networks using optical communication is rapidly increasing, so that a PON (Passive Optical Network) has been suggested and is being developed as a method capable of most economically forming an optical subscriber network.
The PON comprises at least one OLT (Optical Line Terminal), a plurality of ONUs (Optical Network Units) or ONTs (Optical Network Terminals) (hereinafter, designated as “ONTs” for the purpose of simplicity), and a passive optical coupler. The PONs are largely classified into three kinds according to their implementation methods.
FIG. 1A shows a schematic view of an ATM-PON employing an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) according to the prior art, FIG. 1B shows a schematic view of an Ethernet PON employing an Ethernet mode according to the prior art, and FIG. 1C shows a schematic view of a WDM-PON employing a WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplex) according to the prior art. Also, FIG. 1D shows a schematic view of an optical subscriber network employing CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology.
One of the three kinds of PONs is the ATM-PON shown in FIG. 1A, in which ATM cells are transmitted at 155 Mbps and with a wavelength of 1310 nm for upstream communication and data are transmitted at 155/622 Mbps and with a wavelength of 1550 nm in cell unit for downstream communication. A second of the three kinds of PONs, which is an Ethernet PON shown in FIG. 1B, has the upstream and downstream wavelength same as the ATM-PON, while using Gigabit Ethernet signals at 1.25 Gbps for both upstream and downstream signals. The ATM PON uses cells of fixed length, while the Ethernet PON uses Ethernet frames of variable length. A third of the three kinds of PONs is a WDM-PON which assigns transmitting and receiving wavelengths to each ONT individually. Therefore, the WDM-PON, as shown in FIG. 1C, uses wavelength multiplexer/demultiplexers not a passive optical coupler, unlike the ATM-PON and the Ethernet PON.
In addition, another method is shown in FIG. 1D in which an optical subscriber network employs CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology. This method employs CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology for both upstream and downstream communications. Herein also, upstream and downstream data according to this method are transmitted at about 10 Mbps.
The ATM-PON and the Ethernet PON of the prior art use TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) technology for downstream communication and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technology for upstream communication in order to transmit data. Then, in the case of the downstream signals, data are transmitted in a broadcasting method, resulting in a problem of signal collision. However, in the case of the upstream signals, the same wavelength is used when two or more ONTs simultaneously transmits their signals to an OLT, so that signal collision may be caused in the passive optical coupler. Therefore, the ATM-PON and the Ethernet PON have to use a very complicated Media Access Control (MAC) protocol in order to solve this problem. Also, since distances between the OLT and each ONT are different from each other, various optical signals of different strengths are inputted into an optical receiver in the OLT, so that a Burst Mode IC (BMIC) is necessarily required so as to receive the various optical signals in stabilization. An optical transmitter in the ONT needs a BMIC to operate the transmitter only in a case in which signals to transmit exist, and it is largely restricted for the ATM PON and the Ethernet PON to receive a guaranteed bandwidth because the PONs use MAC (Media Access Control) and so forth.
In the case of the WDM-PON, since the MAC is not used, operation of the PON system is simple and a broad bandwidth can be efficiently guaranteed, however, it is difficult to product optical transmitter/receiver modules in a low cost, so that continuous studies and development have been made on a low cost of optical transmitter/receiver modules.
Meanwhile, in the case of an optical subscriber network employing CDMA, because CDMA is applied to upstream communication, it has an advantage in that the use of MAC is not required. However, the CDMA technology is also applied to downstream communication in the optical subscriber network in spite of the fact that the downstream communication adopting broadcasting method doesn't need MAC, so that the construction of the ONT and the OLT is complicated, thereby increasing the cost. Also, in the conventional optical network employing CDMA, data must be divided according to each subscriber by an switch in the OLT before transmission of the data, thereby complicating the operation of the OLT.